Vera Frenkel’s String Games: Improvisations for Inter-City Video

Abstract

In the autumn of 1974, the Canadian artist Vera Frenkel staged String Games: Improvisations for Inter-City Video. Two groups of participants – five each in Toronto and Montreal – engaged in a remote version of the classic string game cat’s cradle. String Games is the first piece of telematic art. However, art historical attention to the artwork has been insufficient. String Games emerged from a watershed moment for network technologies, specifically within a context of telecommunications development in the Canadian nation state. Telecommunications-based art has a long legacy in Canada, the country that exactly a century before Frenkel’s artwork saw Alexander Graham Bell’s patent for the telephone in 1874. His namesake company launched the Bell Canada Conference TV System in the early 1970s. In its day, the System was one of only four organizations worldwide that provided conferencing technology that engaged video, audio and computer networks. Decades before studies alerted us to the cognitive overload of Zoom fatigue, the effects of ‘continuous partial attention’ and to the importance of non-verbal, bodily signals in digital media, Frenkel and her collaborators used telematics to consider new ways of being together with and through embodying new communications tools. This article provides a historical analysis of String Games, situates its role within the history of networked art, and explores the artwork’s co-operative realization of live connection and a feeling of co-presence in the context of technological development in the Canadian nation state. Within the context of early interactive video work, String Games was a notable innovator.